TRACKING: Jurassic World-

Jurassic World – Tracking Off Track

‘Jurassic World’s All-Time Record: Why The Town Didn’t See It Coming Until It Happened

by Anthony D’Alessandro June 15, 2015 9:07pm

The biggest opening weekend of all-time? Who would have thought?

On Thursday, in a straw poll of studio execs, Deadline received three different answers in regard to Jurassic World‘s domestic opening: The predictions were $115M, $125M and $135M. The thought that Jurassic World would make $172M+ and push Universal Studios past $1B at the 2015 B.O. would have been a ballsy projection — $145M tops according to one distrib analyst.

Tracking typically wears the dunce caps in these off-kilter prediction scenarios. However, distrib chiefs sincerely swear NRG, Screen Engine and Marketcast’s systems aren’t broken, and as one forecasting insider asserts: “We’re not paid to predict box office, rather identify pockets of strength, threats and opportunities in the marketplace for the studio. … It’s a five-week journey with daily phone calls.”

And as Uni execs watched hourlies rally for Jurassic World, word-of-mouth took off like a velociraptor barreling through the woods. According to social media monitor RelishMix, YouTube views for Jurassic World from its opening through Sunday were at 38M vs. Furious 7‘s 33M. The top Jurassic World spots were registering views on par with Furious 7 and the re-post rate for Jurassic vids on YouTube was 45 to 1 (the average is 9 to 1).

The dinosaurs clearly had fans in a trance. On Saturday alone, the Jurassic trailer pulled 1.4M YouTube views. The official trailer for Jurassic Park on Universal’s YouTube channel counts a total of 66.6M views, beating Furious 7’s 61.6M. Twitter hashtag #JurassicWorld peaked at 63K on Sunday after building for seven days; 3X higher than Furious 7. Heading into the weekend, Rentrak’s social media index PreAct clocked the WOM for Jurassic World at 98%, which not only means that the conversation for the film was very high on social media, but that it was positive too.

Says RelishMix’s lead social strategist Marc Karzen: “Surprise polling 500 or even 5,000 people about a film that they may or may not want to see doesn’t correlate to box office well. It’s a qualitative response of how much they want to see a movie (sequel) or if the marketing is memorable. But what’s more powerful is how thousands and millions of people share trailers with their community, or not, on multiple social channels. That shows intent (to buy a ticket) and if the movie exceeds expectation, as Jurassic World did, the Internet and box office explodes”.

And once the word was out on Jurassic World, it was all about keeping up with the Joneses.

Observed one studio box office analyst: “When a movie over-delivers and reaches that zeitgeist fever pitch, people feel like they can’t miss out. This even goes back to Twilight (opening $69.6M) and the first Hunger Games ($152.5M) — movies that over-delivered on tracking. With everyone more connected, there is a pack mentality among moviegoers more so than ever before.”